40
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2013
sidled up to the table. "The second
Kusama is sold," he said. The price was
four hundred and twenty thousand dol-
lars. Zwirner dropped by and reported
the sale, to an undisclosed buyer at an
undisclosed price, of a Blinky Palermo
painting, a last-minute addition to the
fair, after a Georg Baselitz picture had
got delayed in French customs. Impor-
tant people stopped by the booth: the
commodities trader Marc Rich, looking
frail in a wheelchair (he died soon after-
ward); the Russian billionaire Roman
Abramovich and his girlfriend, Dasha
Zhukova; Leonardo DiCaprio, whom
Zwirner greeted with the exclamation
"Movie star!," as though saying aloud
what he'd meant only to think.
Zwirner is forty-nine, tall and fit, with
a Caesar haircut and a brisk, forthright
manner. He wore, as he usually does, un-
faded bluejeans, a blue button-down shirt,
and a navy sports coat. He has a slight
German accent---he was born in Co-
logne---and a particular way of not pro-
nouncing his "r"s and "l"s. The word "gal-
lery," which he uses a lot, has traces of
Elmer Fudd and Colonel Klink. His
cheeks and neck tend to flush when he is
angry or stressed, but he generally culti-
vates an affable, regular-guy air, and listens
with a tilted head, genuinely curious.
When he has decided that a conversation
has reached its logical end, he punctuates
it with a quick sideways nod. He has what
seems to be a guileless way of asserting art-
world pedigree while acting as though he
stood outside it all---he's of it and yet not.
Zwirner, the son of a famous German
dealer, opened his first gallery in 1993, in
SoHo. Since then, he has risen to be one
of the most prominent dealers in the
world. He is not really a pioneer, in terms
of the art he has championed, or the style
in which he has presented it, or the peo-
ple he has sold it to. He is, in many re-
spects, one more boat on a rising tide.
Still, the brightwork gleams. People
often say that he's angling to be his gen-
eration's Larry Gagosian---every era has
its dealer-king---but his approach is re-
ally nothing like Gagosian's, or anyone
else's. He brings the calculating eye of an
efficiency expert to the historically im-
provised hustle of buying and selling art
objects. "He's the new dynasty," Gavin
Brown, the New York gallerist, told me.
"It's the Norman conquest."
"The action is on!" Zwirner whispered,
in a mock-dramatic voice. "Can you smell
the money?" Selling at fairs, immensely
profitable as it may be, is perhaps his least
favorite element of art dealing. "This is
the most commercial part of what we
do," he said. "It's almost perverse."
On one wall was a Gerhard Richter
painting from 1971, an abstract swirl of
color that looked to my untutored eye a
little like a screen-saver pattern. Zwirner
was selling it, on consignment, for a Eu-
ropean collector. The sale prices for
Richter are higher than for any other liv-
ing painter, but this one, an early work,
was priced low, at $3.5 million. (A later
work of its size might sell for five times
that.) It had attracted the interest of an
American collector in black hiking pants
and a black short-sleeved shirt, with a
jacket folded over one arm. He kept
moving to new vantages, perhaps to test
his enthusiasm. At one point, Zwirner's
art handlers took the painting down
from the wall, and the collector asked for
the condition report. Then he abruptly
left, saying that he'd be back. Zwirner
told him that he'd give him until one-
thirty. After that, he'd have to take it off
reserve.
Another man stood studying the
painting, from a distance of thirty feet.
He had the build of a Rolling Stone, long
frizzy gray-flecked hair, and a brown
front tooth. "I'm trying to buy a painting,"
he told me. It was Ivor Braka, a private
dealer from London, known for his early
collecting of---and lucrative trade in---the
work of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud.
He was in Basel as an adviser to another
collector, but he coveted the Richter for
himself. He was, at present, the backup
reserve buyer. If the American collector
dithered, it would be his. Zwirner ges-
tured toward Braka and said, "He's seeing
what I'm seeing, an undervalued work."
Braka had been coming to Basel since
1977. "You used to be able to look around
in a leisurely way, but now it's a scrum," he
said. He had decided to wait and see if the
collector would come back. Perhaps his
lurking presence would compel Zwirner
to enforce the one-thirty deadline.
"It's tricky," Zwirner said. "My ulti-
mate responsibility here is to the con-
signor." That is, his job was to sell the
Richter---it didn't really matter to
whom---yet he also had to treat the
American collector with the consideration
due a client of importance. The situation
was complicated by the fact that one of
Zwirner's partners (Hanna Schouwink)
was working with the American and a di-
rector (Ales Ortuzar) was handling Braka.
Each client belongs to a salesperson. The
sales staff are paid on commission, so
technically they were competing with
each other, although at Zwirner's gallery,
to stave off conflict, they are bound by a
written code of conduct, which Zwirner
guards as a trade secret. He kept an eye on
the progress of the Richter.
By one-thirty, there was no sign of the
American collector. Braka and Ortuzar
huddled, and Ortuzar said, "I'm on it." At
one-fifty-two, the American appeared
and resumed scrutinizing the painting.
"Look at him sweating," Zwirner whis-
pered. After a while, he gave the collector
a now-or-never gesture. The man bor-
rowed a chair, sat down, and stared at the
Richter for a while, chin in hand. Braka
stood ten feet behind him. Soon the
American got into what appeared to be a
heated discussion with Schouwink. Ortu-
zar approached Braka, and Braka, with a
pained smile, nodded and walked away.
Zwirner joined the collector and Schou-
wink. He spoke emphatically to each of
them, slapping the knuckles of one hand
against the palm of the other. Everything
is negotiable. At two-fourteen, the collec-
tor shook Zwirner's hand and bent to kiss
Schouwink's. The Richter was his, and
Zwirner had earned three hundred thou-
sand dollars, enough to cover more than
half the cost of the gallery's booth in Basel.
"One of the reasons there's so much
talk about money is that it's so
much easier to talk about than the art,"
Zwirner told me one day. You meet a lot
of people in the art world who are ex-
hausted and dismayed by the focus on
money, and by its dominance. It dis-
tracts from the work, they say. It distorts
curatorial instincts, critical appraisals,
and young artists' careers. It scares away
civilians, who begin to lump art in with
other symptoms of excess and dismiss it